February 13th, 2025: Party As Articulator
(Screenshot of the article ‘Party as Articulator’)
For two hours, we discussed the article ‘party as articulator’, which gives a framework for revolution. The article has four main ideas:
Social movements arise when there is massive upheaval in society. These social movements eventually stagnate as the momentum of the upheaval wanes, and people find themselves, once more, in the bubbles of trying to order their own lives rather than remaining united.
“There are moments, such as the recent George Floyd uprisings, when people break this pattern [of going through their lives pursuing various individualized survival strategies]. Instead of dismissing themselves as powerless individuals, they re-imagine themselves as agents of change. Instead of dreaming of how things should be, they demand that they must be different. Instead of following the old routines, they experiment with new forms of activity. Instead of passively embracing the identity categories imposed on them, they construct a new kind of subjectivity. Instead of dealing with issues independently, they will seek out other people to help confront a shared problem… The state will disarticulate the unity of social forces, and then decompose the social forces themselves. Where once there was a united struggle, there will be social forces fighting among themselves. Where once there were collective subjects fighting to solve shared problems, there will only be separated individuals.”
In order for social movements to give rise to a revolution that irrevocably changes society, the social movements need to i) stay intact after forming; and ii) harmonize their actions with other movements.
“…social forces are organized, and are based in organizations. After all, social forces can only exist in action, struggle, movement towards a specific goal, in response to a specific shared political problem. And the only way to coordinate the capacity to act, to build the power necessary to realize a solution to that problem, is organization. Without organization, you have no social forces.”
The ‘party as articulator’ is not a political party, but a tool meant to help social forces stay intact and harmonize their actions.
“The party, then, acts as a kind of binding element, trying to find a way to bring together diverse social forces, and to help them stay together, despite the many tendencies pulling them apart. And different parties will advance different strategies to make this possible. This is tough work. The party must find a way to creatively unify an enormous diversity of experiences, forms of struggle, and political goals into a lasting unity, all while preserving genuine differences.”
The ‘party as articulator’ never enters politics itself, but gradually hives off the functions of state power to bring about a new form of politics that is legitimately governed by the people.
“…seeing the party as an articulator means refusing to treat it as a vehicle for governing. There is a temptation, especially today, to focus on elections, passing reforms, one day winning state power. This is sometimes sustained by the belief that it is here, in the state, where real power resides, and that only after conquering state power can we actually change things… Instead of a party of government, we must insist on the autonomy of the party from the state. To be clear, this does not mean refusing to engage with the state. The goal of socialist politics is not to take over the state – whether through an insurrection or an election – and run it in a better way. It is to disassemble the state by creating mass organizations of counter-power that hive off its functions.”
Initial thoughts on the ‘party as articulator’:
A: I think the article is talking about the party as, not a political party, but an intersectional force that deals with all kinds of issues, while also being aligned with solidarity actions, and responding to other liberation movements.
B: My general way of thinking is that it’s too much of a claim to think that you can engineer sustained struggle and a class party. This is not a question of theory, or a concept of party: it is much more of an organic process, in which, when people are involved, they keep rearticulating conceptual tools. If you really think that capitalism is on the verge of being overthrown and we just need the right theory, then you probably are not starting from a materialistic view of society, which is what all socialists should have in common. More specifically, I think there are some empirical claims about how culture, society and how individuals work that are just thrown into the article without substantiating them. It argues that the default mode of society is individualism - I think that is very abstract. There could be a general tendency for individualism, for people to not form collective resistance for their coworkers. But it is also the case that people always kind of find alternative ways of forming identities, forming cultural bonds, with people in all sorts of different venues. A person who is exploited somewhere might not identify as a working class man, but as a specific video game lover, etc.
A: So, what you’re saying is, everyone always makes a community somewhere, and it’s not because of an individualism thing that they are not involved with larger political issues.
B: It's not a bad starting point to claim a baseline individualism in society. But I would argue it's just a tendency, and it’s good that people are trying to diversify the ways in which class struggle can recruit and support the fight against different forms of oppression. My point about it would be: “what distinguishes the working class as a primary force versus a structure to build on”. It's not that the working class is oppressed, there are some who are oppressed much worse than working class people. It’s not about the number of ways that they are oppressed. It’s more about the structural position that allows them to leverage their power in certain positions that others are not as strong to do. Workers could unionize in workplaces and in different ways, so they could leverage some kind of local and regional and then national leverage against the ruling class, in a way that maybe just being a member of a neighbourhood wouldn’t give you, as structural sources of power.
A: So, your first point [about engineering class struggle], in the context of the article, is that the party is incapable of doing what it claims it can do, because the means by which people create those liberal ideas cannot come from this party but rather a variety of different forces? And you took issue with the party having a role of educating people into a revolutionary action and how that's not really possible.
B: I don't resist the idea of a party playing an educational role. I resist two ideas. First, that a party should be mosaic and sensitive to all different sorts of forces and challenges; I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be supported or can’t be, but it should be distinguished from something that restructures the party. Second, this idea of the party cooking revolution. I don’t think parties cook revolution or cook a class - this might be a pessimistic point, but I feel like no social party in the US, for example, will bring up a working class party.
C: I’ll just jump in here to give some clarification. The ideas in the article are built up very carefully and with nuance, and it’s not clear right until the end how all the ideas fit together and what the full concept of the party is. I think the last paragraph ties everything together well and summarizes what the party is:
“The party, in other words, is a finite instrument. It is not a hypnotist, compelling individuals to come together as social forces. It is not an inventor, calling into being entirely new forms of organization through cloistered thinking. It is not an omnipotent teacher, bringing consciousness to workers, helping them realize what they already are implicitly. It is not an army that wages war against the state on its own. And most importantly of all, it is not a ruling body, a government in waiting. It is a specific kind of organization that is called into being to address specific problems based on specific historical conditions.”
From this, I think of the party as being like a family therapist: it doesn’t interfere or seize control in any way, but tries to listen, understand, and mediate. The party doesn’t create social forces, it doesn’t interfere with preexisting social movements, it doesn’t tell any movement what to do or how to do it, it merely tries to unite the social movements in their shared vision and keep them intact and in harmony with each other so they can achieve their own self-proclaimed goals. I wanted to bring that up since you said you disagreed with the idea that the party “cooks revolution”. It doesn’t cook revolution.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and Palestinian liberation movement:
A: I have some thoughts on spontaneity. The flare-up that causes a movement and how it’s sustained - a part of that sustaining force comes from consecutively large flare-ups. I don't think that the Palestinian resistance, for example, would be the size that it is if the public hadn't been looking at the BLM movement of 2020, 2021. It is those kinds of flare-ups - and it's still happening. And now we have Trump’s election, but as awful as it is, that might be the force that causes the sustenance of the people’s movement. There is something actually happening because there are these massive moments that keep happening.
B: So you’re saying that BLM and others gave the groundwork for Palestinian resistance?
A: That kind of discussion about liberation, discussion of tactics, of history, of liberatory action, did affect how people then organized around Palestine. We're kind of young, and I think just now there's so much individual action. Could anyone have predicted the encampments last year? I don't think so. And I don't think we're going to be able to predict the next thing that's going to happen. If those things get bigger and bigger, I dont think we're going to see burnout, I think we're going to see more unity.
B: In Canada we don't have a noticeable Black community the way we have it in the US - ghettos, hoods, neighborhoods that have been segregated, racialized for centuries, decades. So I was wondering - if we're talking about a connection between the murder of George Floyd, BLM, and Palestinian liberation - it should have been more the case in the US than in Canada, right?
C: Yes, and I think the Palestinian liberation movement was larger in the US than in Canada. The first encampments started there, and they had the most brutal crackdowns. And freedom of speech, when it came to Palestine, was threatened far more in the US.
A: There are cultural shifts in Canada because of movements in the US.
C: The baseline turbulence in American society as a whole was higher.
B: I find it hard to define the concept and function of a party. The party is what people find it to be, what they need it to be.
A: The party, in the article, is not something to work towards, or a tool. But the people, the mobilized people, will use the party as a tool, if the conditions are right, to achieve their goal.
C: Exactly. That’s why I used the family therapist analogy for understanding the role of the party.
B: But I want the party to become state power. In 2014, in Greece, there was a collection of socialist parties that came into popular vote, and they wanted to fight and reform certain policies of the previous right-wing government, and they basically were crippled because the defense ministry was run by the right wing conservatives, and they said ‘if you push too hard, we can topple you’. They couldn’t form any of their radical policies. Revolutions are always, at a certain point, going to faze the coercive body of the state - they will face some kind of defense ministry, security - and they're going to deal with it somehow. That's a question that you're not going to be able to run away from. Disassembling everything by being a headless network of kindhearted individuals - it doesn't make sense for me. Part of the socialist case is to keep certain stuff public, and not make it private. For example, what problem do we have with public education? I’m not one of those dogmatic socialists that everything should be public, everything should be private. Probably, the public education system and the public health system are inherently socialist.
C: The party isn’t imposing any rules about what ought to be. I think those examples about public education and other were only examples of things that might potentially be toppled by the party - if the people want it. The point of the party is that the things that the people want will happen.
On what would happen if the party became state power:
B: I also have a problem with the way the article claims that the party becoming state power will always be bad. A worker state is fundamentally different. People talk about worker’s state as a collection of social states to topple a capitalist state. It is a jump to say that the party as state power will immediately lead to the USSR.
A: I think the USSR example is what the article is warning about - that you have this revolutionary struggle in Russia, but very soon after, it was taken over by state power. And you got the collapse of the USSR because it subsumed itself within the state, and the party started to govern. That governance is what the article is warning against. That's something that can happen, and it should be prevented.
B: Well, to add to that, it didn't turn out to become the USSR because workers chose to form a worker state. Workers chose to form a state because they found themselves struggling against certain Stalinists, factions, which were rooted in different class dynamics, and they tried their best and failed. It's not that choosing the state means stalinism. You don’t have to make every concession. There's a gulf of these people fighting against each other.
C: I think the key is you saying that “you don’t have to make every concession”. The party, as conceptualized by the article, harmonizes and unites all struggles while maintaining their individuality. So even one concession is too much. Even one concession breaks that representation, which was the entire point of the party.
B: But when you talk about the individual rising to an electoral policy, you have to make a concession. The other thing is that - if you are fundamentally a party, you are not an individual. And, as a party, not as an individual joining a party, you could not make every concession unless you cut your ties with a certain class.
C: I think it’s not about keeping the majority of the values. It’s about not making any concessions at all. And I think that’s why the article argues that the party should not strive to rise to electoral policy at all - precisely because it will make concessions inevitable. That isn’t in the article, but that’s my rationalization of why. I had the same battle in my head: why shouldn’t the party become the state, if it genuinely represents the people? The reason is that participating in state power, in any way, will force concessions of some kind, and then the point of the party is lost. We see this at the level of individual politicians who have good ideas and social justice-oriented values, but once they’re in politics, their hands are tied because of political dynamics. They have to make concessions just to stay in power.
A: And the problem with the state and state power is that it can enact violence against whoever it wants. And if you engage with the state, then violence can be done upon you. They quashed workers' revolts very sustainably. I think there is a way of governing structure and a state, a way of coordinating everything, but to have the state as it has existed is to replicate the kinds of capitalistic violence that has existed, and that's not always going to be good. So conceding to the state through the party is how it ends up.
C: And I’ll emphasize again that even one concession is massive. The goal of the party is to harmonize diverse social movements while preserving their individuality. There could be some social movements that are more militant, more educational, more intellectual. So it may seem like one concession out of a thousand, but that one concession could be the entire identity of a social movement that the party was meant to include.
A: And that power - of silencing a movement - if you could do it once, why not do it again?
C: The concessions increase because it's easier.
FD: But then… this is so idealistic.
C: It is.
B: And you’re sympathetic to this?
C: It’s not that I’m sympathetic. It’s that I think the logic is clean.
B: I haven't had discussions about Marxist theory, socialist, anarchist theory, in two years. I am loving this.
C: You should join us again!
B: And to defend my grounds: I didn't say that the party makes concessions on its core goals, but I feel like certain parties will not survive if they start to go down certain paths of making no concessions. They wouldn’t have to make concessions on their principles; they have to distinguish between strategy and tactics. So the idea that when you become a worker state, you find yourself grabbed by the structure of state power, that you produce bourgeois hierarchy - you just need one person to mess up the whole thing, make one bad decision, transform the worker state into a Stalinist state. The way that Marx would talk about it is instead that we have workers unions and workers councils all over the country, and those form a central national level union, and this could choose between different parties, and form a coalition. It could display, call back, replace any of the members of the government. It's basically the working class having all the power to replace change, different socialist parties in the working state. Stalinism messed up that organic relationship between working class and working state, and they stopped unions, independence, and that didn't happen overnight, that happened over a civil war in Russia and also the change in class dynamics. If we have that structure in place, I can't see Stalinism happening.
A: In order to ensure that the failures don't happen, we need to critique why it happened, and the reason was how the parties engaged with the state. The article provides tools by which we can get to whatever happens.
C: I think the article’s concept of a party would actually encompass what B was saying - to have an organic relationship between working class and working state - if it was legitimately what social forces wanted and the conditions allowed. Because the role of the party is simply to harmonize social forces in their shared visions and help keep them intact.
On urgency:
B: Another thing: we are living through a climate crisis - we need urgency. If we don't unite as a planet, we are doomed. I think consistently every socialist party, whether in its formative years or not, has to not take a conceptual judgment about power - debating whether self-governing good or bad - but make decisions. Anarchism is beautiful, but given the ecological crisis, given other dangers, we might need a state that is very powerful.
A: But if the party kind of exists right now - with nebulous activists - a part of the intersectionality of every movement is about climate change. Part of Palestinian liberation is the ecocide that is concurrent with the genocide. When it comes to power, the critique of power is that if you have power you are able to oppress people. And the argument isn’t that there shouldn't be organizations, but rather that those organizations should be authoritative while also valuing autonomy. Those things need to be balanced. It's not that this group of people are incredibly eco-focused - so their little corner is doing whatever it can - but rather there needs to be the authority to make the changes to stop climate change. And that doesn’t come from power necessarily but ideas of authority and how to ensure that authority does not encroach on autonomy to the point that it does violence towards people.
C: I would also argue that the role of the party is rooted in social forces already, so the party can only be as anti-urgency as the social forces. And the social forces - especially those focused on climate change - are not anti-urgency. The party deals with what’s on the ground, it comes into existence only by virtue of social forces. My contention with the article comes from a different premise entirely: is it the case that harmonized forces are necessarily stronger? I’m not convinced that separate social forces are less strong than harmonized ones. I think some social forces should not speak with each other, but separately thrive. The premise that harmonization is stronger is interesting.
A: I partly see the harmonization as keeping solidarity with others even after your goal has been accomplished. And to find strength in isolated struggles even while understanding that you’re fighting for the same thing.
